The Voices Beyond

Prologue

The ghost ship came gliding out of the darkness across the black waters of the Sound, giving way to nothing and no one.

The boy in the rubber dinghy didn’t have time to get away when the ship suddenly appeared. His small inflatable craft almost capsized in the collision, but at the very last moment he managed to pull close to the steel hull and throw a line around the gunwale.

The ship loomed above him. It was oily and rusty, as if it had been sailing the seven seas for many years. Nothing was moving on deck, but deep inside he could hear the throbbing of an engine, like the beating of a heart.

The dinghy had been damaged and was letting in water, so the boy had no choice. He reached up to the gunwale and clambered aboard.

Cautiously, he climbed over and down on to the dark deck; there was a powerful stench of rotten fish.

Slowly, he crept forward, along the side of a closed hatch.

After only five or six metres he saw the first dead man. A seaman dressed in filthy dungarees, lying on his back and staring blankly up at the night sky.

Then more seamen came staggering out of the darkness towards him — dying or already dead. Yet still alive. They reached out to him, spoke to him in weak voices, in some foreign language.

The boy screamed and tried to flee.

Thus began the last summer of the twentieth century in the village of Stenvik.

And thus began the story of the ghost that haunted the village.

Or perhaps it all began some seventy years earlier, in a small inland churchyard. With another young man, Gerlof Davidsson, who heard the sound of someone knocking loudly from inside a coffin.